A review of power electronics equipment for all-electric ship MVDC power systems

Medium Voltage DC (MVDC) distribution Power Systems for all-electric ships (AES) can be regarded as functionally composed of three subsystems, namely the power sources, the load centers and the distribution network. Extensive use of power electronics is required for connecting power sources and load centers to the MVDC bus and for protecting the MVDC power system through properly placed DC circuit breakers. In this paper, an overview is given of the power electronics equipment found in the literature and on the market that could be suitable for use in future AES MVDC power systems. Some industrial experiences regarding DC generator systems, energy storage apparatus and solid-state DC circuit breaker prototypes are reported in the paper as examples of state-of-the-art realizations. Different DC/DC converters, which can be employed as solid-state transformers, are also discussed and a structure obtained by combining them is proposed.